1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a communication system including a management terminal and a plurality of communication terminals and enabling quick maintenance and management, in more detail, relates to a method for managing the status of communication terminals by a management terminal and to a management terminal and communication terminals for the same.
In the communication system in which a plurality of communication terminals such as telephone terminals, data terminals, facsimile terminals, and other communication terminals are accommodated in communication network and communicate for each other, the number of communication terminals has been increased steadily and therefore results in increasingly larger system size. As a result, a need has arisen for a means for facilitating the management of the terminals in the large sized communication system.
2. Description of the Related Art
As will be explained in detail later referring to the drawings, the management terminal manages to operate the communication system stably, by collecting the status information of the communication terminals such as data terminals, telephone terminals, facsimile terminals, and other communication terminals, by judging whether or not the different parts are operating normally, and by instructing maintenance personnel etc. to repair parts where abnormalities have occurred.
In such a communication system, conventionally, when the management terminal requests status information from communication terminals, the management terminal has to request the status information by specifying the desired communication terminals. In a large sized communication system, however, there is a problem that it is not easy to specify the most suitable communication terminals. Further, a communication terminal, even if a failure occurs, cannot send out status information unless it receives a request from the management terminal. Accordingly, the collection of information by the management terminal becomes slow and there is a problem of a long time required for the maintenance and management.
Further, in a large sized system, a plurality of management terminals sometimes are distributed at different locations. In this case, status information can only be transmitted to a particular management terminal and therefore there is a problem of a lack of flexibility. Further, the status information is transmitted by occupying a speech path, so there is a problem that the communication terminals cannot communicate during this period.
Further, the status information transmitted from a communication terminal includes all of the status information held in that terminal, which means that the management terminal must process an enormous amount of information. That is, various types of information are included other than the information most required for the troubleshooting, so there is the problem that the time required for analysis of the information in the management terminal becomes long. Further, the communication terminals are not provided with means for confirming whether or not the status information transmitted to the management terminal has actually reached it, so there is a problem that it is impossible to guarantee that all of the desired status information was able to be collected when a management terminal manages the communication terminals.